The growth of social media platforms these past few years has opened so many additional avenues for interactions between brands, influencers, and creators with their audiences. This meteoric rise of content production, however, has resulted in users experiencing content fatigue.
The situation got aggravated even further when the monde entier experienced lockdowns and individuals increased their content consumption as a consequence. Businesses and content marketers should grasp the concept of content fatigue sooner rather than later to avoid giving content the fate of display ads.
But what is content fatigue?
Simply put, Content Fatigue is the state of weariness that results from over-exposure to content.
It’s usually brought on by too much information overload and being inundated with content.
Although Content Marketing is still viable today, ever-increasing competition, the ever-increasing spread of misinformation, and ever-increasing production of non-valuable content threatens the receptiveness of audiences towards the content and consequently, diminishes the ROI from Content Marketing. Here is how brands and creators, alike, can be smart about content marketing going forward.
3 Ways to Prevent Content Fatigue Build-up in Audiences
01. Focus on Quality: The window to grab the attention of audiences is minuscule and competitive. Content intended to provide value and help the individual along the buyer's journey will make him stay.
Businesses leveraging clickbait to get eyeballs on their content may get the audiences’ foot in the door, but the recipients will soon thereafter realize the lack of substance in the content and keep their distance.
Attention garnering and pseudo-value offering are social currencies that drape the eyelids of only the time passers.
Content for the sake of producing content or just because Tom-Dick-Harry down the lane is posting every day, so you must too, is a practice absolutely ruinous.
The Content Marketing Institute has a core content strategy statement that you can refer to ensure your content efforts are aligned to serve your audience and your goals.
02. Leverage Conversations: GUILTY! Many businesses are guilty of leaving out the ‘social’ of their ‘social media strategy. Social Media posts sharing insights and updates are just one element of the strategy.
Involving the people in conversations is a good to way to let them get up-close and personal with your brand and invite them through the double doors.
Social listening can be a powerful way to understand how your content message is being perceived, and many brands can identify moments to chime in on the conversation with their followers.
03. Make content Time-Restricted: When done right, FOMO can have a positive marketing impact. Extending its arms and applying FOMO to content strategy, content creators can bring together a significant number of people to engage and participate in conversations in real time. The bottom line, however, remains the same-offer valuable content.
Content-right now and never again.
Apps like Clubhouse make it possible to deliver content that is engaging, impactful and yet, not adds to the pile of content.
In Clubhouse, by setting up a room around a particular topic, individuals can join a said room and participate in conversations by getting on the stage and asking questions or by simply dropping a message to the moderators.
Webinars and live sessions are other avenues to deliver time-restricted content.
The challenge with the delivery of content in this format is discoverability. There is no way for unfamiliar audiences to discover and re-consume the content already passed by. The onus rests on the creators to make their audiences from other platforms aware of the time-sensitive content being made available.
Expert tip: Content creation around trends in your niche/industry are insightful topics that can fit well with time-sensitive content delivery. However, evergreen content should primarily be delivered through other formats such as blog posts, and secondarily, through webinars or apps like Clubhouse.
In Closing
With accelerated digital adoption, individuals are consuming content with more frequency and at much more volume. This can make them reach their threshold much faster and get fatigued by the content volume. By delivering only the highest quality of content, or an original spin/opinion on a beaten-down topic, content can still shine for your marketing strategy.
A utopian world would be one where all participants of an industry come to the agreement to provide short-form content (except for when returning content for a search query) to make content more digestible.
